Thursday, September 6, 2012

How to access Manifest (Embedded) resource from an Assembly in WinRT application.

CodeProjectIn
this blog post, I am going to demonstrate on how to access a simple XML file embedded
in the WinRT assembly.

One
of the easier way to retrieve an assembly in .Net application is by using below
method.

//
This will return the assembly whose code is currently executing.

Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();

Alternate
one is to use Type object of the classes present in the assembly.

Assembly assembly = typeof(DemoClass).GetType().Assembly;

From
the assembly object we can retrieve the manifest resource stream (embedded
file) using GetManifestResourceStream() method. All we need is to pass the name of the embedded
resource. The name of the embedded resource is the combination of root
namespace, folder path and the file name.

For example consider the root namespace of a demo application to
be MyApp and the XML file (Embedded.xml) is available under Resources folder of
the assembly. Then the name of the embedded resource is
“MyApp.Resources.Embedded.xml”.

In
WinRT, Both GetExecutingAssembly() and GetType().Assembly
are not available, instead you can retrieve the assembly object from the classes
declared in the assembly by means of using TypeInfo object. Now the remaining
part to access the manifest resource is same as in .Net application. Please
find the code snippet from below.